The third Meeting of ASEAN Ministers of Environment of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar as well as ASEAN Secretariat and other development partners kicks off on Mar. 31 in Siem Reap province focused on the prevention of transboundary smog through forest fire. AKP 1-4

Scheduled to coincide with its one year anniversary, the gathering was attended by some 300 delegates from private and governmental bodies, relevant regional (ASEAN) and international guests, and embassies.

Founded on Mar. 31, 2012 with 14 members, according to Ms. Seng Takaneary of the Cambodia’s Women Entrepreneurs Association (CWEA), the association has increased its members to 150.

2011 Economic Census of Cambodia by the Ministry of Planning listed more than 300,000 small and medium enterprises in Cambodia, many of them run by women.

Ieng Sary : Con trai phát biểu không gửi tiền ở Hải ngoại. RFA. 1-4 Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary’s son has denied reports that his father hid funds in an overseas bank account before he died last month while on trial for war crimes.

News reports said in recent weeks that among the assets the co-founder of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime held was a Hong Kong bank account that at one pointcontained U.S. $20 million in funds funneled to the movement by the Chinese government.

Any hidden funds, along with other assets, could have been handed over as reparations to Khmer Rouge victims had Ieng Sary been convicted by Cambodia’s U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal before his death at age 87 on March 14.

Ieng Vuth seen leading his father’s funeral in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Malai near the Thai border.

But because he died without a sentence, all of Ieng Sary’s assets remain within his family.

Ieng Sary’s son Ieng Vuth, the deputy governor of Pailin province, on Monday denied that his father had kept any funds set aside in a foreign bank account.

“All I know is that it is not true; this is about politics,” he told RFA’s Khmer Service, dismissing the reports as one of many “false allegations” against his family.

He said his family had not hidden any ill-gotten gains amassed during the Khmer Rouge era before Ieng Sary’s 1996 defection to the Cambodian government.

“If we had gotten millions of dollars before our defection as we are accused of, he would not have hidden it.”

Ieng tiếp

By Sebastian Strangio The Atlantic April 1 2013, Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary is assisted during his pre-trial hearing at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in the outskirts of Phnom Penh on June 30, 2008. (Reuters)

MALAI, Cambodia– It was the sort of send-off his own regime would never have permitted: an elaborate Buddhist funeral that ended with prayers, reminiscences, and the crackle of fireworks in an inky night sky. Ieng Sary, one of the last surviving leaders of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, died of a heart attack on March 14, at the age of 87. For a week afterward, hundreds of white-clad mourners turned out in this former communist stronghold to pay their last respects to a man they remembered as a comrade and patriot–a man who thought only of his nation.

To everyone else, Ieng Sary enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only person to be tried for genocide on two occasions: first in 1979, shortly after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, and then more recently at a UN-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. By dying in the dock, he escaped justice for his role in the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Led by "Brother Number One" Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge conducted a hellish communist experiment–a "super great leap forward" that killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians and sowed a green land with hundreds of mass graves.

But that’s not how Sary is remembered in this forgotten corner of the country, a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge until the mid-1990s. On the day of his funeral, monks chanted as wartime comrades and sun-cured farmers arrived at Sary’s country villa to pay their respects. Wreaths of flowers surrounded his gold casket, which sat alongside a jasmine-fringed photo of the former leader. Later the casket was moved into an elaborate two-story crematorium festooned with blinking lights. During a 10-minute eulogy, Sary’s daughter Hun Vanny made just one reference to his involvement with the Khmer Rouge, a period when "he sacrificed his life by leaving his wife and family, moving from place to place."

"Cambodians talk about the purity of water, purity of gold, purity of silver," she said of her father. "None of these can compare with the purity of heart."

Also paying a final farewell was Sary’s frail widow and fellow defendant Ieng Thirith, who was led to the base of crematorium before being bungled into a van and driven away. Thirith served as the Social Affairs Minister under the Khmer Rouge and was also on trial until her release in September, when the court ruled she was unfit to stand trial due to dementia. As Sary’s body burned and fireworks flowered overhead, old comrades reminisced about a boss who fought to free his country from foreign domination. "Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot were not communist people–they were liberators," said 58-year-old Chan Sary, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who lost a leg to a landmine in 1990. "At the top they didn’t know the hardships," he added, leaning on his crutch.

This is not the story historians usually tell. When the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975, toppling a U.S.-backed republic, they treated Cambodia’s people as an expendable raw material with which they planned to forge a rural utopia of unsurpassed purity, an agrarian dream-state whose name would "be written in golden letters in world history." Money was abolished, the cities were emptied, and the entire population put to work on vast rural communes. Sary was one of the six members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)–the nerve-center of the regime. Appointed foreign minister of "Democratic Kampuchea" — as the new regime euphemized itself — Sary issued calls for sympathetic Cambodian intellectuals to return to reconstruct a land destroyed by five years of civil war. Of the 1,000 or so who returned, most were jailed, executed, or perished from starvation or disease.

Many years later Sary would deny any involvement in Khmer Rouge atrocities, but experts have little doubt there was enough evidence to convict him. In 2001, Steve Heder, a leading historian of the period, concluded in a paper co-authored with the legal scholar Brian D. Tittemore that arrest and execution orders routinely crossed Ieng Sary’s desk. They concluded there was "significant evidence of Ieng Sary’s individual responsibility for CPK crimes, for repeatedly and publicly encouraging arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout Democratic Kampuchea."

Ieng Sary was the most slippery of the Khmer Rouge leaders–a master dissimulator who easily shed old revolutionary convictions and adopted new guises. He was "a devious manipulative man, crafty rather than clever," wrote Philip Short in his book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. "He concealed insincerity beneath a calculated ability to make himself agreeable." Unlike his austere comrades, Sary was also a revolutionary with a taste for the finer things, such as lobster thermidor, cognac, and French perfume, which he enjoyed during years of starvation and civil war. "When he dropped his normally radiant smile, [it was clear] how dark and harsh his face could become,"wrote James Pringle, a former Reuters correspondent who first met Sary in China in 1971. "I would hate to have faced him across an interrogation table."

After the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979, Sary and his colleagues fled to the Thai border, where they re-established themselves in jungle bases and, with Chinese and Western support, waged war on the new Vietnam-backed government that had replaced them. Sary, now in charge of the movement’s finances, installed himself in Pailin, a dusty boomtown surrounded by rich gem and timber deposits. By the 1990s he had grown rich — much richer than his austere revolutionary colleagues. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the two remaining defendants at Cambodia’s war crimes court, did not profit from their careers. Pol Pot died, defeated and penniless, in 1998.

In August 1996, Sary defected to the government in return for a royal amnesty that quashed a death penalty handed down by a Phnom Penh tribunal in 1979. Sary and his wife lived a comfortable life in a shady villa in central Phnom Penh, jetting off to Thailand regularly for medical treatment. Justice finally caught up with the pair in November 2007, when they were arrested and charged with crimes against humanity. It was a heady moment: Nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, there was a hope that at last justice would be done.

But Ieng Sary’s death mid-trial is a major setback for Cambodia’s war crimes court, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. After six years and more than $150 million, the tribunal has secured just one conviction–that of Comrade Duch, a former school teacher who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in running S-21, a grisly security center where he oversaw the interrogation and torture of as many as 15,000 people.

The two remaining defendants in the court’s second case, known as Case 002, are also frail and in uncertain health: 86-year-old Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue and "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, has been in and out of hospital and was reported earlier this year to be "approaching death." Khieu Samphan, the regime’s former head of state, is 81. Peter Maguire, the author of Facing Death in Cambodia, compared Sary’s death to that of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 while on trial at The Hague, and argued that both tribunals allowed themselves to become mired in legal minutiae. "This is typical of the UN’s post-Cold War war-crimes trials," he said. "Like the Milosevic case, there is no urgency."

The court has also been dogged by allegations of political interference in connection with two possible future cases, Case 003 and Case 004, involving five more senior regime figures. Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former mid-ranking Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam in 1977, has ruled Cambodia in various coalitions since 1985, and retains a strong grip over the domestic courts. In October 2010 he told visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that more trials at the ECCC–a hybrid court composed of local and international judges–would not be "allowed." Because of these two impediments, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a court-monitoring group, said last week that "it remains doubtful that the ECCC will successfully complete its current caseload and make a positive contribution to ending impunity and increasing respect for the rule of law in Cambodia."

But the problem runs deeper. In some ways Sary’s death has heightened the contradictions of a tribunal process that has always struggled to reconcile the irreconcilable: to map the abstractions of international criminal law onto the social and political realities of contemporary Cambodia–a post-conflict country with virtually no history of independent courts. This gulf was illustrated shortly after Sary’s death, when the London-based human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement urging the expedition of the trials. "Ieng Sary should not be presumed guilty of the crimes alleged," it said, "as the proceedings against him were not completed and there has been no verdict." In legal terms this was exactly correct, but how just or moral was it? The ECCC was explicitly established with the victims in mind, and was the first tribunal of its kind to invite participation from civil parties representing those who suffered under the Khmer Rouge. How much solace were victims expected to take in the fact that the legal procedures had been followed, and that a man whose crimes are well attested by the historical record had gone to his grave–as many will no doubt interpret it–"not guilty?"

It showed, above all, that Cambodia remains a long way from The Hague. Sary’s death, like Milosevic’s before it, demonstrates that one of the saving ideas of our times–the hope that international criminal tribunals can punish atrocities, deter warlords and provide closure for victims–remains burdened by serious limitations. "Cambodia is a complex, mostly Buddhist country," said Maguire. "The idea that Western outsiders can transplant Western modes of conflict resolution is incredibly naïve."

And yet, this may be the closest Cambodia gets to accountability for the horrors perpetuated by the Khmer Rouge. Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches Khmer Rouge history, said that now that the court was in motion it had no option but to continue its work. "The court must move on," he said. "The UN and the Cambodian government made a promise to punish the perpetrators of genocide. The victims deserve closure. The victims deserve to see the process completed."

Ieng Sary’s victims will have to make do with the verdict of history — but that may well prove the more enduring.

Sebastian Strangio is an Australian journalist based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His reporting from across Asia has appeared in Slate, Foreign Policy, The Economist, and other publications.

Cambodian microfinance lender Acleda opened a wholly owned subsidiary in Myanmar on March 25, although the company has been operating since February 18, an official said.

The company, which will be called Acleda MFI Myanmar, has a five-storey office tower on Shwegondaing Road in Bahan township, a bank spokesperson said last week.

The spokesperson said Acleda was granted a permit to trade by the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration on September 6 last year, and has been licensed to carry out microfinance operations as a credit- and deposit-taking organisation on February 8.

“Our company has been run as a deposit-taking microfinance institution with an initial paid-up capital of K8 billion, or US$10 million,” the spokesperson said. “We have been granted a licence to operate a microfinance business, and our first step is to offer this service in 15 townships in Yangon Region, including South and North Okkalapa, South Dagon, Insein, Shwe Pyi Thar, Thaketa, Hlaing Tharyar, Thingangyun, Mingalar Taung Nyunt, Dagon Seikkan, Dawbon, Dala, East Dagon, Mingalardon and Thanlyin,” he said.

Mr Kim Bunsocheat, managing director and chief executive officer of Acleda MFI Myanmar, said: “Our vision is to be Myanmar’s leading financial institution providing superior financial services to all segments of the community. We are choosing to work in Myanmar because it is a developing country and a neighbour of China, where we hope to expand to in future,” he said.

Mr Kim Bunsocheat said that by March 21 the bank had served 292 customers, with 189 accounts holding deposits of K1.836 million, with loans totalling K35.750 million, he said.

Acleda MFI Myanmar is offering loans through two channels: privately and through groups. Private loans can only be provided with collateral but group loans – where a number of people take responsibility for a debt – do not, he said.

“We have set our interest rates in accord with the laws in Myanmar, and our smallest loans are K100,000,” he added.

Acleda Bank has operated in Cambodia for about 20 years but has been looking to establish a presence in Myanmar since 2012, said Dr In Channy, the bank’s president and chief executive officer. The bank has 238 branches in Cambodia and another 29 in Laos, he said.

“Now, we can build a branch office in Myanmar and we will try to cooperate with regional experts in our business,” he said.

The company sent two groups of 36 Myanmar staff to do training in Cambodia in 2012, a bank press release on March 25 said. It added that the bank plans to employ 750 Myanmar employees.

“Our mission is to provide small entrepreneurs with the wherewithal to manage their financial resources efficiently and by doing so to improve the quality of their lives,” the press release said.

“By achieving these goals, we will ensure sustainable benefits to our shareholders, our staff and the community at large.”